I was recently at a fast food restaurant , and they had new, larger cups for their sweet tea (the greatest beverage ever invented!), with a new logo on the side and a cool new dispenser. Life was great, as nothing is better than a big cup of sweet tea on a hot summer day in GA, that is until I arrived at the lid section. Unfortunately, no one had checked to see if the old lids fit the new cups. So there I was, still happy about this big old cup of nectar, but a little miffed about not having a lid that fit it. They quickly purchased some new lids, and everyone is now happy with the larger cups and the wonderful tea. I guess you would say that this situation is an example Law of Unexpected Consequences.
The same thing, on a very minor scale, has happened with our new self-reported grade chart and high school transcripts. When our team of Evaluators had to analyze each HS transcript as it came in, determine the number of academic grades, and enter in the grades in our system, we occasionally missed logging in a HS transcript that we had. A back-end program was written so that if any HS grades were entered into the system, the HS transcript received field would then get a Yes to fix this human error. This program was just a part of the background script that occasionally fixed an error, and so it did it’s job and was forgotten.
Now we transition to the 2011 Freshman application, when the applicants began entering in their self-reported grades. These wonderful self-reported grades are flowing into our system like clockwork, allowing for an earlier decision timeline down the road. But everyone forgot about that little back-end program. As you can guess, when the self-reported grades started coming in, this caused the system to automatically indicate that the HS transcript was here.
Luckily, we caught this situation early and only have a limited number of phantom transcripts, and we are now working to correct this problem! I expect that it will be fixed shortly, any phantom HS transcripts will be wiped out of the system (but the real ones will still show as being here), and we will once again have a status check with the correct information.
We are sorry for any confusion, but we know that the great positives of the new self-reported grades will far outweigh any minor issues.
Go Dawgs!